"BIONIC" Album by Cristina Aguilera

"Reinvention can be a tricky thing."

Bionic is the fourth studio album by American pop singer Christina Aguilera, released on June 8, 2010, through RCA Records. The 18-song album sees Aguilera collaborate with a new range of producers and songwriters including Tricky Stewart, Polow da Don and Samuel Dixon who have each produced three songs for the album as well crossing over from several different musical styles including R&B, pop, electropop, and synthpop.

Bionic is the singer's first studio album in four years since Back to Basics (2006) and was preceeded by lead single, "Not Myself Tonight" which reached top 40 in most countries. Upon release, the album received mixed reviews from music critics. Some praised Aguilera for being daring and experiemental whilst others felt that she was heavily influenced by her collaborators which resulted in inconsistancy. In the United States it debuted at number three on the Billboard 200 albums chart with sales of 110,000 copies, becoming her lowest charting album on the chart. Bionic made UK chart history by first debuting at number one with lowest number of copies sold in eight years and then by registering the largest weekly decline for a number one album.

-The Bionic campaign began with the promise of a pop superstar’s futuristic return to the scene after an extended love affair with ’20s and ’30′s-inspired vintage sound. On the way back (to the future, if you will), Christina Aguilera would confront setback after setback in trying to properly relaunch herself.

In looking back at the campaign’s early stages, there’s little doubt that the Iamamiwhoami viral videos–now all but confirmed to be a project created by Swedish singer Jonna Lee–largely contributed to the initial deconstruction of the Bionic campaign’s magic.

For those unfamiliar, the mysterious web series first cropped up on the web in late 2009 as a series of two or three minute clips uploaded on YouTube. The videos featured an unidentifiable blonde frolicking around in the forest licking trees, rolling in mud–and generally just being weird–as lovely, lush electronica music played in the background.

While warped video and sound effects veiled the singer’s voice and face, early screen-shots from the clips all stubbornly pointed to the same source: Christina Aguilera.

At some point, most people began to believe–or at the very least, wanted to believe–that the “proof” photographs that circled the blogosphere did indeed come from Aguilera’s camp.

After all, the album was newly titled Bionic (which sounded forward-thinking), she was flying below the radar (filming Burlesque with Cher, as it turned out), and her album’s growing collaborator list was comprised of avant garde, left-of-center artists and producers like Ladytron, Hill & Switch, and Le Tigre.

So when the preview of the radio-friendly lead single “Not Myself Tonight” finally premiered on Aguilera’s website back in March, the hope that one of pop’s princesses was going deep underground quickly and definitively deflated.

“Not Myself Tonight,” too, was another major strike against Bionic. Production wise, the song sounded as though it were recorded in 2002; a by-the-numbers club banger that was neither bad nor particularly innovative. For a comeback track after an extended absence from the pop scene, however, the decision to release the song as the first single was devastating. The song’s final chart positions only further solidified proof of the folly, peaking at a modest #23 on the Billboard Hot 100.

The final blow against Aguilera came in the form of a new-found rival pitted against her in the media: Lady Gaga. Almost immediately after revealing the cover art and album title for Bionic (and truly, ever since her masked VMA performance in 2008), Aguilera continued to battle sharp, inaccurate criticism for allegedly lifting Gaga’s future-pop styling, eventually leading her to write a formal response to the drama on her website.